WASHINGTON, D.C. - Members of a House oversight committee on Thursday sparred over whether the 2020 census should ask citizenship questions and whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross should have to answer questions about the matter because it is the subject of an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case.

Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform said the citizenship question was proposed to reduce immigrant response rates, so areas where they live will be short-changed on measures allotted by population such as congressional representation and federal funding.

Republicans on the committee noted the census contained citizenship questions for years before it dropped off the form several decades ago. Champaign County GOP Rep. Jim Jordan said the Democrats’ “drumbeat against a legitimate question” about citizenship status will diminish census response rates, and detract from other census-related issues the committee should be probing, like the cyber-security of the first Census that households can respond to online.

“The purpose of the data collected by the citizenship questionnaire is, after all, to ensure everyone’s vote is counted fairly and no one suffers discrimination at the ballot box, said Jordan. “Surely, the majority does not object to robust enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.”

Another Republican member of the committee, Holmes County Rep. Bob Gibbs, said the census asks many detailed personal questions about race, nationality and income for statistical purposes, and it makes sense to include citizenship.

“We ought to know how many citizens are in this country,” Gibbs said, noting the survey wouldn’t inquire about the legal status of non-citizens.

Ross told the committee that all but one decennial census conducted between 1820 and 2000 contained questions about citizenship or country of birth, and many other democracies around the world collect citizenship information in their census inquiries. He said that the Department of Justice had asked the Census Bureau to reinstate the citizenship question to help it enforce the Voting Rights Act. All individual information collected by the census is confidential, he said, and the data is used for statistical purposes.

“Obtaining complete and accurate information for use in determining citizen voting populations to enforce the Voting Rights Act is a legitimate government purpose,” said Ross. “And I determined that the importance of that goal outweighed any potential decrease in self-response rates that may result from people violating their legal duty to respond to the decennial census.”

The committee’s Democratic chairman, Elijah Cummings of Maryland, said he disbelieved the “pretext” that the information is needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the Trump administration has “done everything in its power to suppress the vote” and that past enforcement of the Voting Rights Act never used citizenship information.

Cummings maintained that Ross was hiding the Trump administration’s actual reason for restoring the question, and that he was not legally justified in withholding some documents requested by the committee because the citizenship question is the subject of federal litigation that the U.S. Supreme Court will consider next month. He threatened to subpoena requested documents if they aren’t supplied in the next week.

Jordan and other Republicans alleged that the hearing was an improper effort to interfere with the pending federal court battle. In a column posted on the Fox News website, Jordan and North Carolina GOP Rep. Mark Meadows alleged that Democrats don’t care about Census integrity and believe asking the citizenship question will cause them to lose power in Washington.

“This is because the census is used to reapportion Congressional seats, and Democrats know that Congressional apportionment according to the population of citizens, rather than total population, will cause them to lose seats in Congress,” the column said, alleging that Democrats need the votes of non-citizens, who are not currently allowed to vote, “to survive as a party.”